For every New Monthly Donor, another FReeper is donating $10.00!!
Please take this generous offer into consideration!
Posted on 04/21/2012 3:58:06 PM PDT by SamAdams76
I like to have a cup of yogurt in the morning with breakfast. The kid with the “live” cultures. They say that those living, nasty-sounding, hard-to-pronounce bacterias like Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermphilius are good for you. OK, I’ll take their word for it (whoever “they” are) as you hear from a lot of 100 year olds telling us that they ate yogurt regularly, along with garlic, olive oil and red wine, so I try to consume all those things on a regular basis, especially the red wine, so I too can make it to be 100 and have a bunch of people asking me what I ate to make me live so long.
I like the whole milk yogurts with the cream layer on top because that makes the yogurt taste more like ice cream and less like what vegetarians would eat to punish themselves further.
But what is it with those preachy messages they keep putting on the lids of these yogurts? Always yapping about how they are using the profits from the yogurt to save a rain forest or help some inner city kids learn how to play tennis or whatnot. It’s as if they think that if they don’t use their profits for some do-good endeavor, that people are going to stop buying yogurt and will buy Jello pudding snack cups and chocolate milk in the dairy section instead.
Well let me assure the yogurt companies out there that they can spend their profits any way they choose. If the yogurt executives want to blow all their profits on a decadent junket in Vegas, I’m good with that. Or if they want to buy Hummers and go four-wheeling in the rain forests, I’m okay with that too. So long as they continue selling good quality yogurt at reasonable prices, I will continue to buy it.
For some reason, I only like eating yogurt in the morning. It’s a good food to wake up with and I usually dump frozen blueberries in it.
On the subject of morning, do you ever wake up just a few minutes before the alarm goes off and knowing that you are about to jarred by the alarm that it is now impossible to get back to sleep? Well that happens to me all the time. I set my alarm, which I have on the other side of the room (otherwise I’d hit “snooze” and fall back asleep) for 5am each workday and more often than not, I’m opening my eyes at 4:54am and spending the next six minutes lying in bed, stressing about the alarm, while getting robbed of six minutes of valuable sleep.
Except every once in a while, I will wake up in the dark and realize that it is still early in the evening and so have several hours still ahead of me for sleeping. That is one of the best feelings in the world as I can now roll over and go back to bed. That is also when I have my most vivid dreams. It seems like when you wake up in the middle of the night and go back to sleep, you remember your dreams a lot better.
That happened to me a couple nights ago. I woke up with the dreaded feeling that it was 4:54am again and it was time to get up and get ready for work. But then I saw that the clock was only at 12:55am so I still had nearly four more hours to sleep!
So I blissfully rolled over and commenced having a nightmare about having apparently committed some some kind of serious crime. I can’t remember what the crime was but it must have been unspeakably bad as I was locked up in jail and my family had disowned me. Towards the end of that dream, I was being led into a courtroom in chains with TV news cameras all around shouting questions at me like “how did I feel?” and “why did I do it?”
In the courtroom, a verdict was read by a mean looking jury that I was guilty (of whatever it was I did) and the entire courtroom erupted in cheers as I was led away by the bailiffs to spend the rest of my life in prison. Then I woke up and was extremely happy to realize that it was only a dream. Now that is even a better feeling. To wake up from a bad dream and realize those things never happened after all.
Now when I woke up from this dream, the bedroom clock read 4:54am and this time, I didn’t mind at all. I leaped out of bed in a great mood and prepared to start my day. So I guess if there is some way I can program a nightmare as being my last dream of the night, I won’t mind getting up so early in the morning!
Dreams can sometimes be like going back in time. I’m always amazed at how my brain can retrieve images of my past when in dream-mode. I dream about things that I haven’t thought about in years.
It would be great to be able to go back in time for real. Especially as people like myself often make stupid decisions. I think it would be great to have a “go-back” button as you go through life. A fifteen minute “go-back’ button would work out just fine for me. So if I get into a car accident, I could hit the go-back button and take a different route to avoid that accident. Or that time I chopped a tree down that ended up on my house, I could have gone back 15 minutes and chopped it a different way until I got it to fall in the right direction.
Of course it wouldn’t do me any good to go back only 15 minutes if I was in a plane that crashed on landing. All I’d do is force myself to crash all over again unless I had the option of hitting the “go-back” button multiple times so that I could get back to before I got on the plane in the first place. Otherwise, I’d need to hope I could find a parachute on board during that 15 minutes and bail out. At any rate, if I had such an option, my life would never end as I’d be constantly hitting the “go-back” button over and over again. I’d probably still be 16 years old trying to get that one girl in my high school biology class to say yes. And if other people had the same ability, it would probably get very annoying - unless they could do it without me knowing about it.
I always wondered why they do not have better facilities at interstate rest areas. I mean, that is about as captive an audience as you can get because people driving cross country don’t want to wander off the highway too far in search of lodging and food and such. Most highway rest areas are pitiful. Usually a couple of dirty restrooms with some vending machines and pay phones in a lobby in between. As well as a large, greasy map on the wall showing you the general area with a little red arrow stating “You are Here.”
Now as you get to urban areas, you start seeing rest areas with more options. Such as a Starbucks, a McDonalds, a convenience store, a gas station and a ticky-tack tourist trap gift shop but that’s about it. They could be so much more.
A smart entrepreneur with some money ought to look into purchasing air rights over interstates in which large motel/shopping/restaurant complexes can be built right over the highway, accessible to both sides of traffic via offramps to the median. A tired family driving cross country could stay overnight in one of the hotel/motels and have access to chain restaurants like Applebees, Red Lobster, Outback Steakhouse, etc. You could also put a movie theatre complex there and even a shopping mall and some bars with live music so the adults could have some night life while the kids are sleeping (that could also be frequented by locals).
Space these complexes a couple hundred miles apart. They would be a gold mine. People driving cross-country would never need to leave the highway. They could wake up the next morning, have some breakfast and be putting miles behind them by sunup.
Speaking of highways, how come they look so large when you are driving on them but so narrow when you are on a surface road driving under them? I live near I-495 and pass under it every day. This is a four lane in each direction but when I go underneath it, the bridges look so narrow! Why is that? I looked on the Internet but was unable to find answers.
Well tomorrow (April 22) is the 30th anniversary of when the rock band Men At Work released their debut album “Business As Usual” in the United States. So it’s been 30 years since those quirky Australians taught us about vegemite sandwiches although I still have no idea what “head full of zombie” means.
I bring up Men At Work not only because it’s been 30 years since that classic album was released (one of the best albums of the 1980s) but because band member Greg Ham (58) was found dead in his home this past week. Nobody yet knows the cause of death but it was said that Ham, who played sax and flute, was very depressed since a court ruled that his flute riff in “Down Under” was stolen from an old Australian campfire song called “Kookaburra Sits In the Old Gum Tree”. (You can’t make this stuff up.) After the 2010 ruling, Ham went into seclusion and his friends said that his life was destroyed as a result. That’s a shame. Stealing a riff should not make you so miserable. Rap stars must be depressed as hell.
Anyway, I downloaded the “Business as Usual” album on iTunes Friday night and it still sounds good all these years later. They had a followup album “Cargo” that also did well but fell off the face of the earth after that. I think Men at Work were talented and had a lot more hits in them. They should have listened to more campfire songs.
Recently we’ve had some very warm spring days but hardly ever do you see kids outdoors in it. They seem to be cooped up in their homes playing video games, watching TV or doing something on the internet. For all they know, it could be zero degrees or 90 degrees outdoors. Seems to make no difference to them.
I find it difficult to be indoors when it is warm and sunny outside. As soon as I get home from work, I put on my shorts and take the dog for a walk. Then I sit on the patio drinking beer, cooking something on the grill and reading a book. At least until the mosquitoes come out.
Speaking of being outdoors, there is a walking trail near my house that features beavers. I hardly ever see the beavers but you know there are there because there are these extremely complicated beaver dams in place, holding back the water. These beavers seem to have it all figured out when it comes to dams. They start with inserting vertical poles, criss-cross the poles with smaller branches and then fill in the gaps with smaller sticks, stones and mud. If they don’t have the materials nearby, they will build canals and float logs over to the dam site. It’s amazing. They never even had to take out student loans to get an engineering degree!
I remember as a boy, knocking holes in one of these dams and within hours, these beavers had the whole thing back in operation. Meanwhile it takes government workers about five years to repair a bridge. Figure that one out. Up in Canada, beavers have constructed a dam that is so massive, it can be seen by satellite. It’s over half a mile long and a hundred and fifty feet high in some places. That’s twice as long as the Hoover dam!
Beavers can live in the wild up to 25 years. They can get up to 60 pounds. Unlike many people, beavers are monogamous. There are no divorces in beaver land. They pick a mate and they stick together for live, raising their offspring together. There’s no time for cheating. Too busy building and repairing dams and lodges and gathering food for getting any other beaver. So next time you hear the expression “busy as a beaver” - you will know that whomever is having that phrase attached to them is indeed very busy, and probably has a stable marriage as well.
Ooh, didn’t know you had a SamAdams76 ping list. Please add me so I don’t miss any of your ramblings.
Cheers! Whenever I have a disturbing dream / nightmare, it usually takes me until mid-morning to convince myself that it didn't really happen.
The ones that are the worst are that I'm dreaming I've woken up the morning of a final exam, or worse yet, defending my doctoral thesis, and I haven't even begun to study...
Cheers!
I promised myself I was not going to click.
I should listen to my gut.
“Nice beaver!” “Thank you. I just had it stuffed.”
Dave Barry once wrote about the Ward Cleaver sitcom, and wondered what it would do to an actual boy to have to grow up being known from childhood as “the Beaver”.
And if I had ever asked any woman in my love life about the need to shave the beaver, I would have long since been gone from this life, because “there are some doors that man was never meant to open.”
Please put me on your ping-list.
STE=Q
Added to ping list
Added to ping list
LOL!
STE=Q
Great writing. Please add me to the ping list if i’m not already on it ... ;o)
Sam, you are deeply in touch with your inner Andy Rooney.
A kid with live cultures? That must be one smelly beaver.
Great headline, but misleading. I thought it was going to be about a new scientific breakthrough that tells me I can increase my productivity by....well, let’s just say I’d love to increase my productivity that way. Sadly, it was about animals.
A pleasant ramble (muskrat ramble) - you should write for a living.
Please add me to the list.
≤}B^)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.